. Why don't you work, as I do? Soon I shall have leave to
sleep, because I have worked well. There is the evening star, and I shall
have a good bed of hay, sweet-smelling fresh hay, to lie upon. How well I
shall sleep. But you, you idle noisy thing, you do not deserve to sleep.
You have done nothing to tire you. And you are empty, dry and thirsty.
Serves you right!" Of course you recognize the allusion to the story of
Tithonus, so beautifully told by Tennyson. The girl's jest has a double
meaning. The word "importunate" has the signification of a wearisome
repetition of a request, a constant asking, impossible to satisfy.
Tithonus was supposed to complain because he was obliged to live although
he wanted to die. That young girl does not want to die at all. And she
says that the noise of the insect, supposed to repeat the complaint of
Tithonus, only makes it more tiresome for her to work. She was feeling, no
doubt, much as a Japanese student would feel when troubled by the singing
of _semi_ on some very hot afternoon while he is trying to master some
difficult problem.

That is pure Greek--pure as another mingling of the Greek feeling with the
modern scholarly spirit, entitled "An Invocation." Before quoting from it
I must explain somewhat; otherwise you might not be able to imagine what
it means, because it was written to be read by those only who are
acquainted with Theocritus and the Greek idylists. Perhaps I had better
say something too, about the word idyl, for the use of the word by
Tennyson is not the Greek use at all, except in the mere fact that the
word signifies a picturing, a shadowing or an imagining of things.
Tennyson's pictures are of a purely imaginative kind in the "Idyls of the
King." But the Greek poets who first invented the poetry called idyllic
did not attempt the heroic works of imagination at all; they only
endeavoured to make perfectly true pictures of the common life of peasants
in the country. They wrote about the young men and young girls working on
the farms, about the way they quarrelled or rejoiced or made love, about
their dances and their songs, about their religious festivals and their
sacrifices to the gods at the parish temple. Imagine a Japanese scholar of
to-day who, after leaving the university, instead of busying himself with
the fashionable studies of the time, should go out into the remoter
districts or islands of Japan, and devote his life to studying the
existence of the common